Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the non-profit behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project that’s currently in use by about half of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft is joining at the Gold Member tier where it joins the likes of Google, Huawei, Ford, GE Digital, NTT, Philips and Swisscom in supporting the project.

Microservices, that is, breaking larger applications into small parts that communicate over APIs, is increasingly becoming the architectural style of choice for many developers (especially when coupled with containers). Managing this fleet of services introduces its own set of challenges, though.

A startup called Lisnr wants to replace NFC and QR codes with a new technology that sends data over audio — a communication protocol it’s calling Smart Tone. The technology it’s invented can be used across a number of applications, including point-of-sale transactions, ticketing and authentication, offline messaging, device to device connectivity and more.

We’re all pretty used to two-factor authentication now, and it isn’t much of an inconvenience to have to type in a 4-digit code when you log in from a new location. But some Swiss security researchers came up with a smart way to authenticate without even that tiny amount of work: ambient noise.

Baidu is opening its self-driving vehicle platform in a bid to help drive the development of autonomous cars. The Chinese internet giant today announced its Apollo project that will see its platform, including vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, opened to help others in the industry, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.

The brick warehouses that line Winnipeg’s Exchange District look the same as they did in the mid-nineteenth century, but commodity traders and grain transporters have moved out and tech companies have moved in. While agriculture and manufacturing faced increasing pressure over the past few decades, the city has developed a tech sector that enabled Winnipeg to reinvent itself.

YouTube has long had an automatic captioning system that, thanks to Google’s machine learning advances in recent years, has gotten pretty good at automatically transcribing spoken words in a video. As the company announced today, its technology is now able to take this a step further by also captioning some of the ambient sounds like [LAUGHTER], [APPLAUSE] and [MUSIC]. For now, the automatic effects captioning is actually restricted to those exactly these three sounds. The reason for this, Google says, is that these are also exactly the sounds that most video producers manually caption right now.

New consumer-facing financial applications are being built on top of old banking infrastructure, while other startups are going around financial infrastructure altogether. Together, they are unbundling the roles of banks and other financial incumbents.

Ten years ago, Apple announced the iPhone, which soon gave birth to the App Store and the resulting broader app ecosystem. That industry has now matured, having reached critical mass, according to a new report from Flurry out this morning. While there’s still some growth to be seen — app usage is up 11 percent over last year, for example — that growth is slowing. And many app categories are now growing at the expense of others, when before, all were growing in tandem.

Honda is another carmaker focused on supplementing the driving experience with an emotional, AI-based component. The NeuV, Honda’s latest concept which it unveiled at CES on Thursday, is a city-friendly lightweight electric car that has Honda’s Automated Network Assistant (HANA), built with SoftBank, on board to help personalize the driving experience.

Unlike IPOs, 2016 was pretty active for tech M&A. The year resulted in $612.9 billion in global tech deals, according to Dealogic, which made it the second best year for acquisitions. It nearly kept up the pace of record-setting 2015, where we saw $691.4 billion in tech transactions across the world. A confluence of factors led to consolidation amongst semiconductors and enterprise tech.

The world continues to change, and insurance companies realize it’s time to catch up. But to really understand where the disruption is stemming from, we first need to remember that at its foundation, the insurance business comes down to managing risk and customer service.

I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today’s machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles’ heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current state-of-the-art establishment.

BMW has already staked its claim in the self-driving production timeline, with plans to release an autonomous electric car by 2021. To help meet that goal, the carmaker is opening a dedicated facility aimed at developing connected and automated driving tech in Unterschleissheim, Germany near Munich. The facility is designed to begin operations in mid-2017, and will host more than 2,000 employees once it’s fully completed.

We tend to think of machines, in particular smart machines, as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. We believe that self-driving cars will have no preference during life or death decisions between the driver and a random pedestrian. And we understand that learning systems will always converge on ground truth because unbiased algorithms drive them. For some of us, this is a bug: Machines should not be empathetic outside of their rigid point of view. For others, it is a feature: They should be freed of human bias. But in the middle, there is the view they will be objective.

A JIRA ticket comes with inevitable, built-in assumptions and ramifications. That the feature / behavior it describes is discrete. That it is ultimately binary, i.e. either complete or not. That it can be individually estimated. That it can be worked on in relative isolation. That its connections to other tickets can be modeled very simply, using JIRA’s childishly simple notion of “linked” tickets.

KKR, the global investment firm, is announcing a $711 million close this morning on its KKR Next Generation Technology Growth Fund, which it plans to use to back growth-stage companies in the technology, media and telco industries in North America, Europe and Israel. It’s a new product for the firm, though you might have seen its name crop up in a good many deals this past year; that’s because it began investing it nearly year ago. Among the bets it has made are the big data analytics company Optimal+ ; the tour-booking platform GetYourGuide; the cloud integration software company ...

Imagine a computing platform that would have no single point of failure and would be resilient to the cyberattacks that are making the headlines these days. This is the promise behind blockchain, the distributed ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and challenges the traditional server/client paradigm.

For years, a truism in software investing was that the value of application software lies in data, not in technology. Companies like Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow are valuable because they are the “system of record” (SoR), or single source of truth, for their customers’ most valuable information, such as customer records or employee data. The newest crop of software applications turns this logic on its head. They mimic consumer companies by using technology as a “wedge” to gain widespread adoption and don’t even try to become systems of record. Instead, they are “systems of engagement” (SoE), meaning apps that ...

Artificial intelligence has fascinated mankind for more than half a century, with the first public mention of computer intelligence recorded during a London lecture by Alan Turing in 1947. More recently, the public has been exposed to headlines that have increasingly contained references to the growing power of AI, whether that’s been AlphaGo’s defeat of legendary Go player Lee Se-dol, Microsoft’s racist AI bot named Tay or any other number of new developments in the machine learning field. Once a plot device for science-fiction tales, AI is becoming real — and human beings are going to have to ...

As the Internet of Things evolves toward becoming one of the fastest expanding sectors in the tech industry, a lot of focus is being given to greenfield development, the process of creating new devices from scratch. The greater potential lies in brownfield development, the integration of connectivity and data collection into things and designs that already exist.

SaaS entrepreneurs are bombarded with blog posts with an array of metrics and variables on which they need to focus in order to build their companies. There are so many metrics that are touted: gross churn, net churn, logo churn, renewal rates, NPS score, etc. To better understand which customer success metrics most impact growth, we examined a subset of pre-IPO SaaS companies. SaaSRadar, McKinsey’s database of pre-IPO SaaS companies. Our conclusion is that gross churn, by far, is the most impactful metric.

VMware signed deals with Microsoft, Google and IBM earlier this year as it has shifted firmly to a hybrid cloud strategy, but it was the deal it signed with AWS this week that has had everybody talking. The cloud infrastructure market breaks down to AWS with around a third of the market — and everybody else. Microsoft is the closest competitor with around 10 percent.

Information technology evolves through disruption waves. First the computer, then the web and eventually social networks and smartphones all had the power to revolutionize how people live and how businesses operate. They destroyed companies that weren’t able to adapt, while creating new winners in growing markets.